Prescribed contraceptives among woman after release from prison

Abstract

BackgroundDespite the high rates of unintended and complicated pregnancy among women who have spent time in prison, little is known about their use of prescribed contraceptives post-prison release. We used a routinely-collected medicine utilisation dataset linked to a longitudinal cohort of adults released from prison to describe the dispensing of contraceptive medication.FindingsThe socio-demographic profiles of women in the cohort were characteristic of justice-involved populations: they were young, poorly educated, unemployed prior to incarceration, with a very high proportion identifying as Indigenous. Dispensing claims data showed that in the six months (180 days) after release from pri..